Archive for August 18th, 2004

Pursue the Objective

I have sat through many a military strategy session or a spy training session or an interrogator’s session where the Hero In Charge told us about how to Pursue the Objective.

Be ruthless, they say. Use emotional appeals, they say.

I have also spent my entire life trying to point out what to me is obvious. I am told that that is what makes me a genius.

I can live with being called a genius.

Someone once said, “The thing about you is that stuff leaps out at you that other people don’t notice.”
In all the sessions I had about Pursuing the Objective, it always occurred to me that the guy delivering the talk was an amateur. There are several million pros who could teach him what he was trying to say.

If you want to know what ruthless and unashamed use of emotion, subterfuge and ruthlessness are, any woman who loves somebody can teach the course. She doesn’t care what she looks like. She doesn’t care how she tricks people. She will cry, she will beg, she will blow your head off.

Colleen McCullough said once, in passing, that women have no mercy. She said that women have love, but that is a different thing. Her point was that women don’t have what a man would understand as mercy.
Yes, that is an overstatement. But there is so much truth there that it is worth repeating.

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Do the work

I complain about people forwarding me articles about the Latest Thing in politics. But I am delighted when people send me ideas or disagreements about my writing that:

1) THEY wrote;

2) They WORKED on it.

I don’t even mind getting a forward if someone writes me an explanation of what they think I should see in it. Nobody likes to plow through a thousand words wondering what the hell this is about.

But much of my best thinking comes from e-mails from people who really thought something over that I wrote about and WORKED on a reply.

Once again, I don’t want to plow through a thousand words of whatever is on your mind at the moment in your train-of-thought mode.

Write it, rewrite it, and make it short and make it clear. That’s what I do for you. That’s what I expect you to do for me.

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